can the bios detect it? (hold delete while starting the computer then enter standard bios to see if it sees both drives). if bios detects it, the drive itself is probably ok.

have you tried just moving the slave drive to another computer? should be plug and play. most likely, whatever is messing with it is on your main drive and another computer won't have the problem, so you can retrieve files from it.

yes, bios can detect it.. the hdd is fine, but the data is all gone... that's where my problem is. i can reformat the drive, but i need the data... im not sure if there's sumthin i can do to recover it...

One of my clients' drives recently went south in that sort of way. No Windows-based solutions would let me access the drive in any way, even in two of my Windows machines.

The only way I was able to salvage her data and save the drive was by putting it one of my Linux boxen. From there I was finally able to mount the partition and copy her data to one of my drives. I also had to use Linux's version of fdisk to write a new, blank DOS partition table to the drive before Windows would let me reinstall.

One wrinkle after that was that because the drive was formatted as NTFS I could not simply copy her data from my Linux drive back to her drive due to Linux's lack of full write support for NTFS. The solution was simple though; I just put the drive back in her machine, slapped the machine on my network, and mounted her drive as an smb mount on my Linux box. Voila-instant network file copy!

Thanks DMR, I"ll try that... as soon as i install linux... I'm planning on installing linux anyway. but it may take a while before i can do that though... what linux do you have??

Currently RH 7.3, RH 9.0, and Mandy 8.0.

(But who knows- that could change tomorrow... :mrgreen: )

BTW: If you install Linux on a system which already runs some version of Windows, it's a good idea to make a separate FAT32-formatted partition for data storage. Since both Linux and Windows can read and write to FAT32, you'll have full access to the data stored on that partition from both OSes.

Try this site, the appz are free maybe they can help you.
http://free-backup-software.net/data-recovery.htm

Or this is what I used to restore a corrupted disk. I dont know what happened, but my system would not recognize my drive as an NTFS. So I use this app and got very lucky. (http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/)

How much space does RH9 need for installation? will 5Gigs of disk space do? i was thinking of repartitioning my 10G HDD into 2 5Gigs, one for windows and the other for linux... any suggestions?

From the horse's mouth

"A personal desktop installation, including a graphical desktop environment, requires at least 1.7GB of free space. Choosing both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments requires at least 1.8GB of free disk space.

A workstation installation, including a graphical desktop environment and software development tools, requires at least 2.1GB of free space. Choosing both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments requires at least 2.2GB of free disk space.

A server installation requires 850MB for a minimal installation without X (the graphical environment), at least 1.5GB of free space if all package groups other than X are installed, and at least 5.0GB to install all packages including the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

A Custom installation requires 475MB for a minimal installation and at least 5.0GB of free space if every package is selected."

Of course, I think a full installation includes something like 4 Web Browsers, 2 or 3 office/productivity suites, 6 GUI options, 2 Web server apps, 6 text editors, an entire suite of scienticfic tools, an entire suite of programming tools, etc., etc., so you won't really need that much space for a typical install. Do make sure to leave enough breathing room to store your data and programs added post-install though, of course.

By the way- RH 9 is the last "free" version of the official "Red hat Linux"; that line has been spun off into the Fedora Project.

ok, so that means 5G of HD space would suffice for RH9. I'll just make it a dual boot PC, I'll install win2k with it so others in my household can still use it.. thanks a plenty, ill give you an update on whether mounting it on a linux box will help...